2015-09-06

Texas Instruments made a good effort in having free and community tool chain for their family of MSP430 low power microcontrollers. Before the tool chain had to be build by the user and that had the usual problems (dependencies, headers, etc).

You will need to register with TI in order to download the installer (apparently you can download the source without registering, current version (for this post) is 3.04.05.01. You need to change the permissions on that file (chmod 777), then run it.
The launchpad is TI low cost entry point development tool, for 10USD you get two processors, a PCB with embedded programmer and debugger and you can also get plenty of add on modules. The new launchpad has a different interface to the first ones (one row of connectors to two rows on each side), in order to support processors with more IO.

Once the tool is installed you can go to the examples directory and search one for your launchpad. There are still some issues, but they can be alternatives.
I didn't manage to connect the gdb_agent_console to gdb and without this connection debugging and programming are impossible. The previous tool chain needed another agent to interface to gdb (mspdebug), this one still works reasonably well.
You still need to program the processor with mspdebug, then enter gdb mode. In another terminal start gdb, connect to target remote on the correct port and then continue.